Enviro-Bear 2000

I maintain an eagle-like vigilance over all of PC gaming, as a matter of principle, so that no game might slip my notice unappraised.  Why do I not extend this watchfulness for console games, you might ask?  Perhaps you ask this while expelling half-chewed Chex Mix across the room in fanboy rage while you heap ill-formed profanities upon my name and call into question my parents' virtue.  Well you unwashed console peasant, it is because PC is, was, and always will be home to the greatest innovation and uniqueness in video games.  Case in point?  Enviro-Bear 2000.

Thunderstone!

I remember when I was, oh, about 11 or 12, my dad bought me a huge binder of Magic: the Gathering cards.  I held it with a strange reverence, this giant block of unspeakably rare and valuable pieces of a brilliant game.  What made Magic so brilliant, apart from it's elegant, crisp rules, was that playing the game was only really half of the game; the other half was DECK BUILDING.  Assembling my 60-card machine, from which I would draw my cards and make a giant mess of it.  Seriously, I was trash at playing Magic; I couldn't even manage when I made a card-for-card remake of a champion deck.  But the deck building, that's what enthralled me.

Flash forward to the futuristic gaming-paradise of 2011 and deck building has become a genre in it's own right. What happens when Magic's meta game gets its "meta" appendix removed, the fantasy gets more grimdark, and all of a sudden it's a race to see who can stop the end of the world?  Thunderstone!